Iraqi Insurgents Plant Qaeda Flag in Baghdad

Friday

Jul 30, 2010 at 5:14 AMJul 31, 2010 at 7:21 AM

The group, which has claimed a series of attacks, raised its flag after attacks on police Thursday.

TIM ARANGO

BAGHDAD — In a brazen late-afternoon attack in the heart of this city’s most prominent Sunni neighborhood, gunmen struck two police checkpoints on Thursday before a series of roadside bombs detonated on police and army patrols responding to the violence.

After the attack — in Adhamiya, a section of Baghdad that was the site of some of the most vicious fighting of the sectarian civil war in 2006 and 2007 — the gunmen raised the black flag of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, according to a high-ranking Iraqi Army officer. According to an official with the Interior Ministry, the death toll included 6 soldiers and police officers and 10 civilians, while 14 others were wounded.

Later, 10 more civilians were injured in a gunfight between insurgents and Iraqi security forces that lasted into the evening and put the neighborhood into a virtual lockdown as the army and police sealed off roads.

The violence was the latest in a series of attacks in recent weeks claimed by, or attributed to, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely homegrown Sunni militant organization. Among them were the bombing of the Trade Bank of Iraq, an assault on the Central Bank, a suicide attack on an Arabic-language satellite news channel and the slaughter of more than 40 Awakening members, mostly former insurgents who had become aligned with the government, as they picked up their paychecks.

In sum, the attacks suggest an insurgency still very much capable of terrorizing the Iraqi population on a nearly daily basis, despite frequent statements from United States military commanders that the group has been severely impeded. In April the American military announced the killing of the group’s two top leaders, and it has since claimed that 34 of the group’s 42 top leaders have been captured or killed.

On Thursday evening the United States military announced that 10 people with ties to the insurgent group were arrested in joint raids with the Iraqi security forces in or near Baghdad, but not in Adhamiya.

In Falluja, in eastern Anbar Province — the main battlefield of America’s fight against the Sunni insurgency earlier in the Iraq war — three separate explosions on Thursday killed five people, including three soldiers.

The persistent violence is taking place as the United States military is drawing down its forces, inevitably spurring reflections on the legacy of the conflict here and the conditions the Americans are leaving behind. It has placed American military and civilian officials here in the delicate position of stressing improvements relative to the violence that raged in 2006 and 2007, when in some months nearly 3,000 people died, while acknowledging the vast gulf that remains from a stable democracy.

“Is there too much violence?” Gen. Ray Odierno, the top American military commander here, said recently. “Is there too much death here? Yes. I’ve experienced a lot of death and violence here in Iraq. And I’m tired of it as well as everyone else.”

But, he said, “it has changed.”

“This is a slow process,” he said. “This is about continuity.”

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the top American military officer, visited Baghdad this week and said that in Iraq today, “hope abounds,” while acknowledging the insurgency’s continued capability to “murder and maim.”

Hope is a sentiment not easily felt on the streets. The Iraqi people complain about a lack of basic services, including just a few hours a day of electricity in the sweltering summer, and leaders who have not yet formed a new government almost five months after parliamentary elections.

The stalemate has left a caretaker government led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to oversee the security forces and try to improve services. The new Parliament has met once, for 18 minutes, and probably will not meet again until the political coalitions can agree on who should lead a new government — which could take well into the fall.

On Thursday Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia claimed the Adhamiya attack. It also expanded on its previous claim of responsibility for driving an explosives-packed minibus past several checkpoints Monday morning in a densely packed neighborhood, parking it in front of the offices of Al Arabiya, a television news channel, and detonating the vehicle, killing six and wounding 16.

In a statement, released on a Web site it often uses to communicate, the group vowed to carry out more attacks against news outlets and reiterated its responsibility “for striking this corrupting, evil channel.” Earlier in the week, the group suggested the attack was in retaliation for Al Arabiya’s broadcast of a program about it titled “Creation of Death.”

The group’s promise to continue violent attacks against news outlets said, “The brothers of Islam should recognize that targeting these institutions and the members that work for them that have chosen to stand in the moat of the infidels is one of the greatest acts of worship to God.”

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